Dear Hugh,

Just a few points as I'm winding down on this topic.

> Both Plath and Lowell are poets I read 1st at
> around 18-20 years old. As was my normal method then, everything
> I could lay my hands on by their hand was read, biographies and
> some critics too.

Me too.  Maybe there is a temptation to repudiate our late adolescent
reading in order to prove we've grown up.  As I have never grown up, I
have no need to repudiate.  Did you read Rimbaud then too?  I did.
Why has nobody the knives out for Rimbaud? I think Plath is
way out of line, not because she writes about death but because she
writes about birth.  Her poems about pregnancy and childbirth greatly
outnumber her poems about death.  Few people talk about them.  It is
culturally acceptable to write poetry about death, but not birth, hence
the great tradition of the elegy, and the absence of any tradition of the
..... birth equivalent (the magnificat!).

My favourite line of Plath's is in prose, "It was
> a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs..."
>
It's not at all surprising that your favorite line of Plath is prose.
It was quite acceptable for her to write prose.  The Bell Jar, published
very shortly before her death, received favorable reviews, free of the
restraining sexism of The Colossus reviews.  Andrew Jackson made a very
interesting connection between Plath and Mary Shelley.  Shelley had two
things going for her, as opposed to Plath: a family literary tradition and
that she wrote prose.

> That's a line to which the gothic attaches, but which doesn't seem
> to involve appropriating the suffering of the Rosenbergs, merely
> notes what was news. A hint of Lowell influence attaches
> to an elegy in my first collection - I tend to think Plath influences
> me away from her, though her metaphors can be brilliant,
> there are better writers whose work touches on dark places
> in their lives.

Your privileging of death exemplifies your culture.

James Schuyler is much better to give a gay male
> example, of a poet writing and demystifying his darker experience
> rather than myth-making. Yes, Plath writes well often and some
> of her poems are striking and original and some pieces expand
> the sorts of subjects 1960s poetry by women discussed, without dealing
> directly with the subject of suicide. An Australian poet prominent in
> the late 1960s, Michael Dransfield, whose heroin related poems
> pointed to what was in fact an early death, was accused of
> 'cloak trailing' by David Malouf, and 'self mythologising' by
> many critics. Many of Plath's poems on suicide, seem to
> be building a mythology around her, though I too think the
> 'Bee' poems to be fine, as with much she wrote near death.
>
> I'm assuming "Three Caryatids..." is an uncollected early piece,
> and Collecteds often leave out things the editor thinks too minor.

Cop-out!  *I'm* assuming that you don't have The Collected Poems of
Sylvia Plath, which included 50 early poems and lists all juvenilia
extant at that time.  You should produce this poem, as you made such a
point of it.  As I said, the title is uncharacteristically long.  I wonder
was it a doodle or a first draft.

> It's my view that Elizabeth Bishop, Fleur Adcock, Margaret
> Atwood, Louise Gluck all suffer from some inattention through
> being less sensational than Plath. It's interesting that you
> express no interest in reading a Tasmanian woman poet who
> often writes well of dark subjects (Margaret Scott), and who
> was Plath's near contemporary and social peer.
>
I don't follow the logic of your grouping Bishop, Atwood, and Gluck
with Plath, unless it is that they are all North American women.
This seems very loose.  It's not at all interesting that I express "no
interest in reading a Tasmanian woman poet who often writes well of dark
subjects," as my comments were directed at the trivial comments attributed
to Margaret Scott, which you posted: we were not discussing her writing.
Furthermore, I am not at all interested in "dark subjects."  My scholarly
interests are metaphor, example, and childbirth.

> We are bombarded with books on Plath's life and work, I'm
> sick of them. Give me Winter Driving by Jennifer Strauss, a
> book about surviving bereavement and caring for bereaved
> children, a book that shows of appreciative reading in Sylvia Plath
> but which also shows of reading in life.

I don't know the book by Jennifer Strauss.  Certainly it falls into a
tradition: with the exception of Anne Bradstreet, the earliest secular
poems about childbirth were expressed through elegy: it was acceptable
for a woman to write about motherhood provided she had lost her children.

> > Yes, we are all poets here, and yes you are intemperate.
>
Yes.

Mairead


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